It was late afternoon on a Saturday in a large European Cathedral when there was a knock on the door. The Sexton was starting to close the church down in preparation for the services of the next day and was unsure whether he should open the door, but thought maybe someone had come in for a prayer, so he opened the door to the great Cathedral. In walked a man of no particular status or stature, an ordinary man, wearing ordinary clothes. The ordinary man in ordinary clothes had a simple request: “Would it be possible for me to have a look at your organ? I have always heard it is a magnificent instrument, and I would be really honoured if I could go and see it.”
The Sexton said, “I am terribly sorry, but we don’t normally let people get close to the organ. The organist gets very upset and nervous if that happens.”
The man pleaded with him, and he said, “Look, I have come from a great distance, and it has been a life-long dream of mine to see this instrument.”
The Sexton, seeing the longing in his eyes, said, “Okay” and took him to where the organ was.
The man said, “Can I sit on the bench?”
The Sexton said, “I am not sure this is exactly what our organist would want, but all right, I suppose it can’t do any harm.”
The man sat on the bench. Then, with longing eyes, he said, “Do you think I could turn it on?”
The Sexton says, “No, I really don’t think so. I know the priest wouldn’t like it. I know the organist really wouldn’t like it. I can see myself getting in a lot of trouble if I let you do this.”
The man pleaded with him, and with those eyes again said, “I have come many miles and have waited my whole life to play this instrument. Please, just a few notes.”
Finally, the Sexton capitulated. He said, “All right, but only for a moment.”
So this man opened the organ, pulled out the stops, and in an improvisational way, started to play the most magnificent music. The Sexton was bewildered and overwhelmed by what he heard. With all due respect to the organist who was there, it couldn’t compare to this man. His playing was sublime! The experience was transcendent! He stood and listened. Finally, the man had played enough. He was satisfied. He turned around from the bench, started to walk down the stairs, thanked the Sexton profusely for his kindness, and said that this was one of his great dreams come true. The Sexton said, “Oh, by the way, who are you?”
The man just simply said, “My name is Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn.”
The Sexton stood there aghast. He said later on that it was one of the greatest experiences of his life to have been the one who could tell people that Felix Mendelssohn had played the great organ of the Freiburg Cathedral!
This story has been retold in different forms over the years, but this is probably the oldest and the most accurate. It is a story about something utterly transcendent, unexpected, that no one could ever have described. The Sexton himself did not have the words or the knowledge of music to explain precisely what Mendelssohn had done, only that he had encountered this great and this magnificent musician playing this incredible instrument, which changed his life.
I think it is fair to say that all of us are dependent in this life on witnesses, who have had an experience of something incredible or remarkable or devastating or splendid, and that even though our experience might not have anything to do with what is actually being told, and why we might not have any prior knowledge of something, we depend on witnesses to tell us what something is like, and we can grasp the meaning and the power of it. My parents used to tell me about the devastating impact of the Blitz in London, and how a once lively community, within a matter of hours, simply became rubble. Or, particularly as this is Holocaust Week and Holocaust Remembrance time, we think of all those who bore testimony to the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. Their stories resonate with us. We have no conception of the horror they must have faced.
Yet there are still Holocaust deniers. There are still those who will question the veracity of the witnesses who told their stories, and question their integrity, so-much so that they cast in some people’s minds a modicum of doubt as to the historicity of the Holocaust. Yet the witnesses are numerous, and their stories compelling. One need only go to the sites to see exactly how devastating it must have been.
It is hard to describe to someone who has not seen the Aurora Borealis how incredible the Northern Lights are, because unless you have seen them, you have no conception of what they are like, and yet there are so many who have recorded it, and shown it to us, for we are dependent upon them. Even in matters of science, we are dependent, are we not, on the veracity and the truthfulness of those who bear witnesses to things that we cannot see and understand?
This past week, when there was great talk about new discoveries in dark matter I thought about the writings of a man who actually preached here some years ago, Sir John Polkinghorne, a great physicist who has taught at Cambridge and was part of the team that discovered quarks and facets of dark matter. He became a Christian Anglican priest, and talked about how we have no conception of how non-matter can in fact have an impact, an ongoing impact on human lives, and how the unseen and even the unobservable can actually still be a vibrant and a challenging and a growing thing. Physics has come a long way in its understanding that even what cannot be seen has energy, and what cannot be quantified can actually expand and grow.
Whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scientists believed that the world was like a clock, controlled by a clockmaker who had nothing more to do with the clock after he made it, quantum physics, the new physics, suggests that rather than being a clock that ticks from a maker who has nothing to do with it, it is a continually expanding and growing and incredible field of energy, much more in keeping with the way in which the Bible speaks of God. We rely on witnesses to tell us that. I doubt many of us here fully grasp the physics around quantum theory or dark matter, but nevertheless we rely on their expertise and their understanding and their knowledge to get us there. This brings me to our text this morning. It is one of those incredibly mysterious passages in The New Testament. It just doesn’t fit with our experience of reality. It is the story after the Resurrection of Jesus appearing to his disciples, but appearing to them not in some psychological phenomenon, not in some apparition, but in a physical way that challenged them.
I want to look at this story in sort of reverse order, and I want to look first of all at the disciples themselves as witnesses and the extent to which the veracity of their witness has an impact on how we understand this story. Let me be clear, the disciples, who were the source by the way for the Gospels – it was their witness that was written down by the Gospel writers – these disciples at no point after the Crucifixion looked particularly good. As I suggested on Easter Sunday, it was the women who had to go to the empty tomb because some of the disciples had fled. It was the disciples who didn’t understand what Jesus had previously said when he predicted that he would die and on the third day rise again; they didn’t understand the Scriptures from which he had spoken and on which he had based his idea of fulfillment. Even when he did appear to them after he was raised from the dead, they didn’t recognize him. The disciples were full of doubts, and Jesus says to them, “Why do you doubt in your hearts? Why do you allow these doubts to come into your heart? Don’t you know what I had told you?”
What Jesus was getting the disciples to do was to question their doubts. Now, doubt when it comes to the Christian life is an integral part of who and what we are. I have never been a subscriber to the belief that any Christian can go through this life without some meaningful doubts and questions. Doubt is an integral part of believing: it is the underside of it in some ways. But, what Jesus wants them to do is question their doubts. Oftentimes, we are asked to question our beliefs. Fair enough! But, do we not also have to at times question our doubts? Do we not have to ask ourselves are our minds so closed to the reality of God and the Risen Christ that we actually don’t really see the reality of God’s presence? Are our eyes so blinded by our preconceptions and our limited understanding of the objective world that we cast out any room for the numinous, for the spiritual, for the transcendent, for the unseen? Sometimes, we need to question our doubts. I even say that to friends of mine who question our faith and bring up the roadblocks and the inconsistencies. “Yes, but you must have the same honesty with your own questioning and your own seeking. I am willing to do that, but you should be willing to question you own doubts as well.”
One of the things I love about the history and the traditions of Jewish rabbis is their love of debate with one another. There was even a debate in the time of the disciples as to whether there was the Resurrection of the dead. The Pharisees, ironically because they get a bad name in The New Testament, believed in the Resurrection; the Sadducees did not. They would debate back and forth, and in that interchange each would challenge not only the beliefs and convictions, but also challenge the doubts of the others. Jesus wanted the disciples to be sort of rabbinic, to challenge their own doubts. The problem is that the disciples themselves were terrified because they thought that what they were seeing in Jesus was a ghost. In biblical times, if you saw a ghost it was a sign of your imminent demise. So the disciples, in seeing this apparition, in seeing this Risen Jesus, even though they held it collectively – we are not talking about one person; we are talking about a group of people who have this phenomenon – they were terrified.
Jesus has to get them to change their views of the way in which they see reality: he has to challenge them in their belief that he is simply a ghost. Now, why is this important? Because if you were simply going to make up a story as a witness of something, don’t you think you would make yourself look good in the process? Don’t you think that if you were going to make something up, if you were the disciples, you’d come out as heroes? On the contrary, it looks like they got it all wrong! Their doubts and view of the world were being challenged; they were excoriated by their own Lord and Master in these stories. Yet, they were the witnesses. Something happened that profoundly changed their lives, and they were willing to go out on a limb and to bear witness to what they saw even though they know it doesn’t match with their prior experience.
It seems to me to give them credibility. But on what evidence was this based? Well, the evidence was clearly that Jesus appeared to them and he wasn’t a ghost. There was something bodily going on here. Between Jesus’ Resurrection and his Ascension into heaven, whatever state that he was in, whatever form of matter he was in, clearly it was something that was corporal, something that they could touch and that they could feel. Jesus said to them, “Here, touch, feel, see.” Then, I think in the most masterful stroke, and this is one of the reasons I love Jesus so much, he wants a free meal! He says, “Have you anything to eat?” Now, does a ghost want food? No! They prepared a boiled fish for him. They dine with him. It is powerful! It is evocative of everything they have done with him. So much of their life around the earthly Jesus was based around mealtimes: Zacchaeus going to dinner, the Upper Room, the Passover dinner, the Feeding of the Five Thousand dinner, the home of Peter with his mother’s dinner, sitting by the side of the hill eating dinner. There was always something to do with food and Jesus. It is one of the reasons why so many of the great celebrations of our faith and of Judaism have been based around mealtime. There is a sense in which God reveals God’s self at mealtime, and Jesus knew this. He knew that God was doing something amazing, and he wanted them to recognize it.
Now, it was beyond their comprehension. They had never seen or witnessed anything like this in their lives before, and they were terrified –wouldn’t you be? If I put myself in their position and I see that the Risen Lord had come to me after I had known that he was dead, and he says, “Hey, I want to have dinner with you” I would be terrified! So, let’s give them a break. What does Jesus say at the beginning of this story? Because what he says at the beginning puts it all into perspective. He says, “Peace be with you!” Okay, you have your doubts, you didn’t understand the Scriptures, you didn’t get the plot, you don’t know what is going on – “Peace be with you!” The only way you are fully going to understand who and what I am is if you have the peace of God in your lives. You see, he understood that if they were continually anxious, they would never see him for who he is, that they would never calm down and be at peace, that they would never think clearly, that they would never be open to something transcendent and powerful in their lives. If they were worried all the time, they would never ever be able to understand.
Is that not the case in our lives? If we are anxious, if we are frightened, if we are terrified, do we really think clearly? I think that is one of the things about exams, and this is exam time at colleges and universities all over. Is it not true that when you go into an exam you need some tension, you need some stress, you need some adrenaline for your mind to work and to be sharp and to be able to answer the questions that are before you, but if you have too much, you go blank, it becomes overwhelming. Well, that was always my excuse in Biology anyway! Too stressed! But, isn’t that what happens in life? Jesus says, “If you are you are going to really understand all this, just be at peace. Let the power of God overwhelm you. Don’t be upset. Trust in me, and trust in the Father who has sent me. I am here for a reason.”
They needed to look at him with new eyes: through the eyes of faith; not the fear of death. I love a story that I read from the Mennonite country in western Canada about a farmer who had grown up on a wonderful farm and had spent his whole life farming. There were great cattle, there were great crops, he had a wonderful farmhouse, great barns, and he had the most incredible vehicles. He thought it was a magnificent place to bring up his family. Gradually, he became apathetic and it no longer had quite the shine that it used to have. He started to see problems with it. The house needed to be upgraded. The furrows weren’t quite as straight as they used to be. The hedgerows were starting to get old. His tractor needed to be replaced. He started to find fault with things, so-much-so that he no longer enjoyed what he had. So, he put it up for sale. He contacted his real estate agent who came over and sat down with him and took down all the particulars, and then a day or two later up on the Internet there it was for sale, his farm! A farm described as one of the most beautiful farms in the west: productive, beautiful buildings, glorious fields, wonderful cattle, magnificent scenery of the rolling hills, beautiful bushes and trees, magnificent barns with new roofs on them, and on and on it went! He read this and he stopped. He got on the phone and he called the real estate agent. You know what he did? He took it off the market! He said, “My whole life, this is exactly the kind of thing that I had been looking for, but I didn’t realize that I had it!” He was seeing with new eyes. Jesus wanted the disciples to look at him with new eyes.
They might not understand it all. They might not comprehend it all. There might be no prior experience that would give them the tools or the means to understand it all. It might just be like dark matter – sort of non-material things that are active in the world – or maybe it was Christ coming back to them to assure them of all the things he had told them: that death would be swallowed up in victory; that he would be vindicated; that there is in life an Alleluia; and that he is risen from the dead. They saw with new eyes, and they told us what they saw. It is time for us now to put aside some of our doubts and to seek that truth in our own lives. Amen.